A Personal Tour Of China's Eerily Vacant Commercial Real Estate

Pudong, China’s “New district,” is, from what we can tell, the country's attempt to replicate Western-style suburbs outside of Shanghai (which is fast becoming China’s financial center). There we discovered a number of completely abandoned “ghost” buildings, one of which came along with something even more alarming: a trickle of smoke coming out of a small pipe that was jutting out of the ground.

The building you are about to see is one of Pudong’s many abandoned commercial buildings, many of which appeared to us to be old factories. This one in particular was interesting because we were able to walk around it and see the bush growing up around the building and even inside the parking lot.

We found at least one man guarding the space surrounding many of the abandoned yards and, in this case, he waved at us to go away and stop taking photos.